Here are your top news stories from eWEEK. Today’s topics include a Harris poll that shows Samsung’s reputation has suffered in the wake of Note7 smartphone recall, the addition of Kubernetes to the Microsoft Azure Container Server, Dell’s announcement that it is ready to launch its hybrid cloud platform on VxRail appliances and updates to SAP’s S/4HANA Cloud business application.
Samsung’s reputation with the public took a hit in the latest Harris poll about corporate reputations in the United States, with Samsung falling to 49th place out of 100 companies after the smartphone maker’s embarrassing 2016 recall of its then-popular Note7 smartphones and problems with some of its consumer washing machines.
That was 42 positions lower than Samsung’s ranking in the February 2016 version of the Harris Poll Reputation Quotient report, when the company was 7th on the list.
The rankings, which have been generated annually since 1999, cover a wide range of factors about businesses, including their products and services, social responsibility, emotional appeal, vision and leadership, financial performance and workplace environment.
Samsung’s overall score in the 2017 poll came in at 75.17 points, down 5.27 points from its 2016 score of 80.44 points, according to Harris.
Microsoft added Kubernetes support to Azure Container Service last November, albeit on a preview basis. Tuesday the company confirmed that Kubernetes is generally available on ACS, according to Saurya Das, program manager at Microsoft Azure Linux.
The open-source container management technology, originally developed at Google and now a project under the Linux Foundation’s Cloud Native Computing Foundation umbrella, joins two other container orchestrators that are currently supported by ACS, DC/OS and Docker Swarm.
On Feb. 16, Dell EMC said that its hybrid cloud platform, Dell EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, will become available for the first time March 31 on Dell EMC VxRail Appliances, the company’s hyper-converged infrastructure offering.
Dell EMC claims there has been “substantial” market adoption since its launch a year ago. Since VxRail appliances launched last February, Dell EMC has sold more than 8,000 VxRail nodes—exceeding 65 petabytes of storage and 100,000 cores—to more than 1,000 customers in dozens of industries across 78 countries.
According to IDC research, revenue from Dell Technologies’ HCI portfolio, including VxRail Appliances, VxRack Systems and XC Series, outgrew the total HCI market—one of the fastest growing IT markets—by more than 2X and represents 28 percent of hyper-converged systems sold in the third quarter of 2016.
SAP recently updated its S/4HANA Cloud business application suite with an array of new intelligent software capabilities that the German software maker is betting will help organizations make smarter business decisions while their users spend less time pouring over enterprise resource planning data.
Based on the company’s in-memory computing and analytics platform, S/4HANA Cloud already produces business insights in real time.
By layering new machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities, the company’s cloud ERP solution now plays a more assistive role in managing complex business environments, explained Sven Denecken, senior vice president of product management at SAP S/4HANA.